We recently had the chance to do an email interview Ian Kennedy a project manager in Yahoo!'s social media group. Ian answered a series of questions about tagging, social media, and data portability. Ian also brainstormed some of the ways Yahoo!'s tools can be used by nonprofits.
NetSquared: Tagging seems to be the must-have feature du jour. Can you give us a quick - two or three sentence description of tagging?
Ian Kennedy: Tagging is a new way of organizing information based on labels that are applied ad hoc by an individual. These labels can cut across established directories or hierarchies. I may tag a photo of my dog "Lucy" and that tag will be familiar to my family and friends. You may tag that same photo "dog." Tagging allows for both the personalized and generalized views to co-exist side by side and be recalled in a way that is familiar and personal to you.
N2: Other than buzz word compliance, why do you think tool makers are including this feature in applications? And, when do you imagine my grandmother will begin tagging?
IK: Because tags are applied by the community, they are more nimble at incorporating a new view or organizational structure. Yahoo understands the power of tagging because it accepts that there are multiple views of the world and that people and the community voice is an important part of making the web relevant to helping people find what they need. Tagging is a relatively new phenomena but one of Yahoo's core talents is simplifying the complex so I hope that we'll have your grandmother tagging in the near future!
N2: Yahoo! is obviously interested in tagging - it's a part of My Web 2.0 and is an integral feature to three of Yahoo's recent acquisitions - del.icio.us, upcoming and flickr - what's the big deal about tagging?
IK: My Web 2.0 and Del.icio.us is a bookmarking services, upcoming.org is for organizing events, and flickr.com is a photo-sharing site. The power of tagging is that a community can easily use tagging to bring together elements of each service around their own set of tags. If you have a "techsoup2006" tag for a conference and you tell your community to use that tag, on a single page you could bring together all the webpages bookmarked, events organized, and photos taken that are related to that event by using the "techsoup2006" as a common thread by which everything is pulled together. Because the community is doing the tagging, there is no need for an editor to sift through the submissions, it would bubble up naturally, as the tags are applied. Editor's note: Just like we're using the "net2" tag.
N2: When Caterina Fake spoke at the web 2.0 conference she talked about tagging as being a way that ordinary users - savvy but still ordinary - could apply organizational principles to the web. That seems to be exactly what Yahoo! set out to do 10 years ago when it established its directory. Do you think tagging will eventually replace the top-down categorization of directories and information on the web?
IK: The two are not exclusive. A directory is an editorial view of the world where a guide or an expert shows you their way to organize things. A collection of tags is another view, one from the individual or, collectively, the community. There is only one Yahoo Directory but there are hundreds of thousands of users on del.icio.us. An individual might tag a number of sites for their own convenience and recall but their tag is part of a collective vote on what that site is about. The value is in the aggregate label that the community gives that object. To go back to the earlier example, by looking at the photo of my dog Lucy and seeing both tags, "dog" and "lucy" you can learn that my dog's name is Lucy. You would never expect a directory to categorize items down to that level of detail but it might help you find something through a browse. When you find that object, the associated tags are incredibly useful for learning more about that item.
N2: Certainly, from the perspective of someone inside the nonprofit/non-governmental sector, tagging is exciting because it offers a chance to create a very specific view of the web that uses words and categories that have value specific to this subset of people. Is that the promise of tagging? That it allows like-minded groups of people to create their own web, giving meaning to things through a more organic self-organizing structure? If so, how do you think tagging itself and its influence on information on the web evolve?
IK: By associating tags with the individuals that apply them you connect like-minded people. If I tag a site "animation" and you tag that same site "art" we each bring very different groups of people to that same page. Likewise, if people are on that site we will send them on a very different journey if they decide to vector off and look at either more "animation" sites or more "art" sites. Providing these pathways, Yahoo hopes to introduce people around material upon which they share a viewpoint.
N2: To get more specific to how groups collaboratively tag, it certainly seems that tagging can provide a way for individual nonprofits to stitch together collective meaning, as well as a distinct internet presence through a variety of different tools (upcoming for events, flickr for images) to organize their shared data bits. Is this reasonable, and do you think groups such as nonprofits can benefit from using these kinds of services versus organizing information in a traditional top-down way on a website?
IK: Absolutely. Yahoo hopes to nurture multiple views of the world through our tagging applications and this not only benefits the individual but also communities including nonprofits that need to organize material in a way that fits their world view. In the same way that we have made tagging available as a collaborative tool to organize information, Yahoo is actively promoting our APIs as a programmatic way to access our information. There are a number of applications that third parties have built that use Yahoo information but present it via new and exciting interfaces.
One example is Rollyo which is a vertical search engine. If you are a nonprofit that wants to provide your users with, for example, a search engine which crawls only ten sites which are specific to, "de-forestation," you can create an account on Rollyo and enter just those ten sites (you can enter up to 25) that you feel are most relevant and you'll get a search box that will search the Yahoo database but limit the results to only hits from those ten sites which you chose. It's a slice through the Yahoo index that is specific to your interest and editorial view. There are countless other examples of these innovations that you can browse through at Yahoo! Developer Network.
N2: As nonprofits use these tools one of the overriding concerns is their ability to get data out of them in the event that they need to make a shift. What kind of commitment does Yahoo! have to data portability and how important a consideration do you think this is?
IK: In general, the idea is that whatever personal information you store at Yahoo is going to be yours to take with you when you need it. This applies to address books, calendars, things that are personal to you and have little or no benefit to the collective. If it's tags, ratings or reviews that you're adding to a collective, there are linkages and dependencies that are created that really require that we keep them in place because your tags may become part of a well-worn trail and it would harm collective intelligence of the system if they were removed.
Some real world examples of how you can use Yahoo products to help your nonprofit:
Other Resources:
Editor's Note: So, are you already using Yahoo!'s tools? Are they working? Not working? How else have you used them? Drop a note in the comments.
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